So, with Google pissing off a large number of people with the introduction of Knol, the blogosphere are busy beating themselves off over a new Google Killer – Cuil. Unlike a number of Google Killers™, this one has two things that set it out:-
- It’s got an article on BBC.
- It’s made up of former Google Employees.
So it seems to be well equipped with the staff, but I have done a few searches and here’s what I found:-
- Gospel According To Rhys – Does return my site
- Retro Garden – Returns Nothing (or it did, now returns something else, either way, not my site).
- Shagablogger – Returns a few Miscallaneous Links
- Colwyn Bay FC – Returns the Rugby Club
- Plurk – Returns Plurk, but as the second result
So, those are a few things, some (such as Wii, Google & BBC) did return good results, but not everybody is searching for the big things. On the contrary – people are more likely to search for things they’re not sure about (the biggest referrer to this blog from google is “The Gospel According To Rhys” with 1000 people each week!), so for them not to get the most relevant site in those area is a bit lacking.
The other thing is that it’s very slow. They need to sort that out, and change the design.
So Cuil, nice try, but not quite there. What do you think?
Comments: 9 Comments
Rhys Wynne, the author of this blog, is a 20 something web designer from Colwyn Bay. 
The homepage design is very nice, spot on in fact.
The idea of contextual ranking is great.
The search results page design is flawed, badly. If you’re going to have multi-column, then do not have a scroll. Missing the bottom row of each column is stupid. Because the results are not aligned in a grid you can’t scan horizontally either. You end up having to scroll the page three times just to read all the results. FAIL, as they say.
The results themselves seem to pull up a disproportionate number of deep-pages instead of offering the domain results first. Being a narcissist I googled my name. My homepage was nowhere to be found, but there was a page full of ancient comments left by me on other websites. My site’s #1 in Google. I then searched for my name and “css” – not one result. Pathetic.
PS – your site require JS to post?
Shouldn’t really….
Ghey, searching for Not Nigella brings up everything I could have ever wanted to know about Ms Lawson, whereas I’m number one on google. Searching “Craft Blog” CB doesn’t even show up on the first five pages.
“the biggest referrer to this blog from google is “The Gospel According To Rhys” with 1000 people each week!”
Why is that do you think? My biggest search is “Not Nigella” and “Not Nigella Tutorials” and I can’t for the life of me work out why the .com bit is so hard to remember?
been learing a little about .cuil whislt on this digi marketing course but its obvious from what they have there is many floors, too many deep links and no where near the ease of use of google (or even any of the other major players). love the homepage its simple as. but where is advanced search?! good luck to them, thats all i can say
I tried it yesterday and hated it. I just do not like the layout at all.
Have to agree with the above ^ Matt. The design is spot on… home page. The delivery of the results I think need a little more sculpting. 3 column is a little rough, two column… not too bad.
@ fern… non relative results on Cuil I explained it a bit on my blog Cuil perfecting not cuil
I just checked it out and its terrible my site in number 2 on page one in google i couldn;t even find it it that search. Ill stick with google
Why are people beating themselves into a frenzy over the knol? I dont get it.